Painting has more in common with God than one might care to admit. Both get declared dead by cultural theorists every few years, and both face ongoing crises about how effective they are at challenging life’s most pressing issues. Painting inhabits dimensions mostly removed from the social universe, and, as a result, doesn’t do the most precise job of attacking, say, world hunger or government corruption in Nigeria. And since the Enlightenment, God’s earthly agency, too, seems limited—unless you’re an excited linebacker who’s just returned a tipped pass for a touchdown, on death row, or you’re Joel Osteen. But, with a little metaphorical imagination, God and painting are both well equipped to indirectly confront the greatest truths of all.
“Cicada Seen,” Peter Barrickman’s show at Green Gallery, buzzes… as its title suggests. It buzzes metaphorically, of course. The exhibition consists of a suite of paintings that lives in the tightest crease between representation and abstraction. Barrickman’s obscure vignettes aren’t fully abstract, but their objective subject matter takes a minute to come into focus. One of the basic joys of viewing his work is determining where the vague residue of the real world meets the idiosyncratic, painterly universes they merge into.
Lobby 5 in Peter Barrickman's "Cicada Seen" show at the Green Gallery
Completed in various media—acrylic paint, colored pencil, foil paper collage and flashe (the latter a dense, matte-finish vinyl paint)—they walk a razor-thin line between the materiality and theatricality of painting. Take the painting Lobby 5, for example, with its relatively homogenous field of vertically oriented red and orange paint licks. The work might reside between Mark Tobey and Clyfford Still in the modernist wing of a museum if it weren’t for the faintest traces of architecture: a staircase; a door; sconces; a tile floor. As soon you recognize real stuff and real space, it is impossible to imagine how non-objective the painting was two minutes prior—and will never be again.
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The tendency of the marks in “Cicada Seen” to align across paintings as well as within them helps further delay a representational read of them. Locating moments from the known universe in Barrickman’s work is like eying individual fish in a roiling, churning school—or training your eye on a single cicada in a swarm of them. Our frontal cortexes are designed to privilege the whole over the individual parts of a visual system. But, despite the potency of these tactics, Barrickman interrupts his own demonstration in gestalt psychology as if to keep things organic and unpredictable.
Loops By D is the most obvious example. It’s an oddball in the scheme of things with its slightly skewed geometry on the right side, next to some clumsy backward lettering and a large, red, painterly sore jutting in from the left; the “punctum in the studium” as Roland Barthes would’ve put it. Are these relationships the marks of shrewd intelligent design or random improvisational noises from the painterly universe?
Keeping you guessing is the ultimate metaphor for playing God. The most divine prospect of painting is establishing a universe from the void, full of constraints and contradictions; being everything and nothing at once. The artist, like a humble, terrestrial god, must create a cosmos replete with all the dualities, joys and inquiries that make that place worth inhabiting—and to have those searching for meaning in it searching endlessly.
The paintings in “Cicada Seen,” and painting in general at its best, lives as a metaphor for all other aspects of life. It’s this indirect agency that keeps painting relevant even when our direct passions might want us to scream obscenities as televisions, make picket signs or confront senators in elevators. Creativity’s virtues are what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott called “adverbial” qualities—indirect governing agents and actions, less visible but more fundamental than direct interventions. Or a version of that old BASF tagline: Painting doesn’t solve your social problems, but it lays the foundations to make solving them possible.
Let’s face it, Barrickman’s painting probably won’t turn this troubled world upside down, but it might have done better by inventing another one entirely.
Through Saturday, Nov. 3, at Green Gallery, 1500 N. Farwell Ave.
